Routing

You've probably learned how to use Controller? Let's try on how explicitly create a route for your modules.

Routing is the place where you define how the system interact with the URL requests. Let's assume we have this page to login example.app/login.

Advisable to know these firsts:

Index:

Basic Usage
Dynamic Route
Naming Route
Route Group
Learn More

Basic Usage

under your project-name/app/main/routes.php, let's add this:

<?php

route()->addGet('login', [
    'controller' => 'Auth',
    'action'     => 'showLogin',
]);

The above code shows how to create a GET request, the first parameter is the /login uri, and if you will be attempting to visit the page example.app/login, the dispatcher will analyze the request URI, if found a match, let us say it matches the route above.

The second parameter comes in, which we point it to Auth controller and the function showLogin will be called.

Go to project-name/app/main/controllers/AuthController.php and write the function like below:

<?php
namespace App\Main\Controllers;

class AuthController extends Controller
{
    public function showLogin()
    {
        return view('auth.login');
    }
}

The above code will be triggered once the url is visited, then we call the view() function to show our template engine file.

Dynamic Route

You've learned the basic, now let's move on to this dynamic route.

route()->addGet('users/{id}/edit', [
    'controller' => 'User',
    'action'     => 'edit',
]);

and here is the controller sample

<?php

namespace App\Main\Controllers;

class UserController extends Controller
{
    public function edit($id)
    {
        # do a model query using the $id passed in
        dd($id);
    }
}

The above codes show how to handle url values, so attempting to run this url to your browser example.app/users/1/edit.

It should die-and-dump the $id which value is 1.

Naming Route

Let's extend more about the login uri by adding addPost also.

Add a setName(<name>) chain on it.

route()->addPost('login', [
    'controller' => 'Auth',
    'action'     => 'attemptLogin',
])->setName('attemptLogin');

In your controller or view, you may call the function route('showLogin') to return the full url.

// ...
class ... extends ...
{
    public function showLogin()
    {
        $post_login_url = route('attemptLogin'); // example.app/login

        return view('auth.showLogin')
            ->withPostLoginUrl($post_login_url);
    }

    public function attemptLogin()
    {
        // code...
    }
}

The code above shows how to get the full url by just getting the route name.

How about the route users/{id}/edit, let's inject a name userEdit in it, and call it this way by providing the id in the second parameter.

echo route('userEdit', [
    'id' => 100,
]);

It must return example.app/users/100/edit.

Route Group

Route group is much more cleaner to use if you want to separate a scope into a class registrar

having a url like this http://example/users/../.. into UsersRoute class
as well http://example/auth/.. into AuthRoute class

Run this to your console:

php brood app:route Users main

> Crafting Route...
>    UsersRoutes.php created!
> Generating autoload files

The above command generates a UsersRoutes.php inside your main module.
Go to project-name/app/main/routes/UserRoutes.php, open the file, you should have this defined values.

<?php
namespace App\Main\Routes;

class UsersRoutes extends RouteGroup
{
    public function initialize()
    {
        $this->setPaths([
            'namespace' => 'App\Main\Controllers',
            'controller' => 'Users',
        ]);

        $this->setPrefix('/users');

        # - url as users/index
        $this->addGet('/index', [
            'action' => 'index'
        ]);

        # - url as users/store
        $this->addPost('/store', [
            'action' => 'store'
        ]);

        # - url as users/1/show
        $this->addGet('/{id}/show', [
            'action' => 'show'
        ]);

        # - url as users/1/update
        $this->addPost('/{id}/update', [
            'action' => 'update'
        ]);

        # - url as users/1/delete
        $this->addPost('/{id}/delete', [
            'action' => 'delete'
        ]);
    }
}

Now register this class in your project-name/app/main/routes.php.

route()->mount(new App\Main\Routes\UsersRoutes);

Create the UsersController at project-name/app/main/controllers or execute the brood console command instead.

<?php
namespace App\Main\Controllers;

class UsersController extends Controller
{
    // add a function
}

That's it, and you should have a simple resource URL.

/users/index
/users/store
/users/{id}/show
/users/{id}/update
/users/{id}/deleted

Learn More

To learn more, I have this reference that shows how fully Phalcon routing works.

https://docs.phalconphp.com/en/latest/reference/routing.html